Good-Bye, SAP Design Guild

As part of an SAP-wide initiative to reduce the number of contact points between SAP and interested parties, we must say good-by to the SAP Design Guild website. From the time of its launch in April 2000, the SAP Design Guild was SAP`s go-to site about design and user experience. Initiated by Peer Hilgers from SAP’s Product Design Center and supported from the outset by SAP’s founder Hasso Plattner, the site provided the public with SAP’s UI design resources as well as editorial content on a wide range of design topics.

When talking about the SAP Design Guild, it is impossible to not also mention Gerd Waloszek. Part of the original team that was put together to design and launch the site, Gerd quickly also became its “all-in-one manager,” sometimes also fondly referred to as “Mr. Design Guild.”

In the beginning

At the start, the website’s main purpose was to make SAP’s user interface design guidelines available to the public. The guidelines were accompanied by a collection of articles under the label “innovation.” These were meant to capture the momentum of the Enjoy initiative that SAP had started in 1998, which revolutionized the design of business applications. Over the years, however, the site’s focus shifted and new content was added to accommodate the changes and to broaden the information the site offered.

Soon after the launch, the team realized that a website is a “living thing” that cannot be based exclusively on relatively stable content such as guidelines. Gerd therefore expanded the site over the years with new types of content.

Then 3 things happened…

The model of the SAP Design Guild was editorial-driven in nature. In an amazing display of professional expertise and personal dedication, Gerd not only coordinated the content on the site written by various authors but was also penned the lion’s share of the content himself. As social networking began to take the internet by storm, SAP decided to take a community approach to the design and user experience topic. And so the SAP User Experience Community, the site you are on right now, was born. That launch was at Sapphire NOW in Madrid in 2012.

In November 2013, Gerd took his well-deserved retirement from SAP. With “Mr. Design Guild” no longer keeping existing guidelines and articles up-to-date or writing new content, the decision to retire the site was at hand.

The third and final reason for shutting down the site was the company-wide initiative called One Digital Experience (1DX) which started in early 2014 as part of SAP’s “Run Simple” program. The scope of 1DX encompasses all of SAP’s digital experiences, with a focus on simplification and giving our audiences what they need, when they need it.

The SAP User Experience Community team has migrated much of the popular information from the SAP Design Guild to the SAP User Experience Community. To find all of the migrated posts from the SAP Design Guild, simply click on this link: https://experience.sap.com/tag/sap-design-guild/. (And keep in mind that we still have all the files hidden away here on an internal server. So if you really are missing something, let us know! We’ll do our best to make it available to you.)

And so it is with some sadness that we say good-bye to this great resource, but also with hope that readers will find a wealth of useful and interesting information on the SAP User Experience Community. With this new approach, we hope to move forward together with you on the topic of design and user experience in a collaborative way.

In this two-part interview series, I talk to Ulrike Weissenberger, VP of Global Design Enablement, and Hanswerner Dreissigacker, VP of Global Design Frontrunner Apps who were respectively early proponents of user-centered design and design thinking at SAP.

This is the second post in a two-part interview series about changing software development culture from one focused mainly on features and functions toward one that invests meaningful and appropriate resources on user experience and design. When teams and management are asked to change the way they have always done things, that is when things […]